


New Junon

by greenjudy



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Bad guys, Loyalty, M/M, Politics, Reno POV, Turks Noir, UST, post-meteorfall, smart!Reno
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-04 11:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5332136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I cut across the bar at an angle, stole a glance as I crossed Tseng’s line of sight, and we locked eyes: big mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Running into Prakesh

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains violence, situations of captivity or uncertain safety, sexual content, and derogatory language, including homophobic slurs.

I was just there to cool down. 

It had been a long and thirsty ride in the helicopter, a long dusty argument with Requisitions at the WRO outpost on the cordon, way outside of town, wanting itemized lists of the equipment I was planning to bring out with me as I went hunting my mark. As for me, I didn’t want anything but a glass of something cold and a chance to throw some water on my face before I got on the boat and headed for the Western Continent. I had a few hours to kill and I’d heard rumors about the place: the rumors had brought me here where the sconces had pink lights in them and a guy with a face like a plate handed me a shot of the local poison, and a beer chaser. 

The air was full of smoke. Out there it was late afternoon; in here, behind a metal slab that sealed off the outside world, it could have been midnight. 

So at first I thought it was my eyes getting old, the booze, the smoke. 

 

—

I caught the line of the shoulder first, then I clocked the movement of his hips, unmistakable. I was on my way over to order another one from the bar and this is what I saw out of the corner of my eye. He was walking across the room and went to sit down with some heavy-looking cats in the far end. One of them hit him in the arm, friendly, like they’d been drinking together for awhile.

What I saw made me curious. I cut across the bar at an angle, stole a glance as I crossed Tseng’s line of sight, and we locked eyes: big mistake. 

Based on my personal experience, you got that waxy complexion around day three of the bender, but I couldn’t tell by sight what other drugs he’d been doing. Something was in his system, that was clear. There were circles under his eyes and a look on his face I couldn’t get to the bottom of—hunger, exhaustion, and something I’d seen in his expression just a few times before, a kind of resignation, like he’d let his demons loose, and now he was watching them run. 

For a second I wondered, I really wondered, if I’d finally caught up with some hidden life he’d been leading. I felt myself close up around my shock the way a fist closes around a secret: this was none of my business, nothing I should be seeing, and I wished I could take myself out of there, rewind and back up, all the way back out of town and back into the helicopter and right the fuck back off into the sunset. 

But he wasn’t ashamed, I realized. That was not what I was seeing. He was afraid. His eyes were glassy, almost gleaming in what was left of the light. 

And as I kept looking, the things my brain saw in his face nagged at me until finally something broke the surface, made me know that Tseng was _acting,_ he was there under false pretenses, and I, stupid fuck that I was, was about to break his cover. 

 

—

In Old Midgar, neither of us could have pulled off an undercover operation. We were Turks, we cut too high a profile, big boys in the playground. 

But this wasn’t Old Midgar; this was New Junon.

“Prakesh,” one of Tseng’s buddies said. Tseng shook his head slightly, like he was a little dazed. Greasy strands of hair slipped across his face. 

“Prakesh, you got a problem?” the other one asked. 

The other one _was_ the problem. 

See, we didn’t need it anymore, the drug they told us was going to slow down the effects of Geostigma. We didn’t need it, but—funny thing—we kind of _did_ need it, now more than ever. And the poppy fields of ruined Mideel and the sketchy shipping regulations covering maritime freight out of Costa Del Sol—turns out we needed those, too. 

So Meteor falls, everyone gets sick, shit boils out of the ground under the Shinra Building, the dust settles and we have a generation of addicted kids and a brand-new Golden Triangle. With New Junon at the hypoteneuse: Shit Central. 

And _this_ guy, unless I was deeply mistaken, was Parvel Har. Parvel Har, drinking buddies with Tseng, who was calling himself Prakesh and looked like he was about to put a gun to someone’s head, maybe his own. 

 

—

It was too late to fake around the eye contact, so we prolonged it. 

Tseng blinked, slowly. My brain was whirling, running combinations, looking for the way to salvage the situation. If I followed my gut on this, I could set Tseng up as the Lizard King or I could get him eviscerated. 

I took a deep breath.

“Long time no see,” I said, “baby.” 

He was on his feet all of a sudden. I kept his friends in my peripheral as clear as I could; they were watching as he pushed the little round table back with his foot, crossing in front of it to confront me. I recognized the remains of a nice pinstripe suit, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, the pants rumpled and stained. 

I let him grab me one-handed, by the lapel of my jacket. His free hand reached toward my face. He ran a thumb across the scar under my left eye, his touch hard and sure. 

Tseng drew me in – his hands were ice cold – and he jammed his tongue into my mouth, and ground his hips into mine. 

_Don’t,_ I thought, _don’t lose it – ride –_

His tongue was cold and wet in my mouth. I felt the shudder, starting in him, traveling to me; I felt his cock, hard, pressing into my hip, and this I did not foresee, it was so disorienting that I almost lost it, dropped the mask. I gasped into his mouth, felt his weight shift, felt his hands twitch, and then I knew what was coming. I got it through skin contact, through breath and pressure and the touch of his tongue and the way his thumb went across my cheekbone like an apology. We both knew what had to happen next. 

His fist caught me just under the ribs, lifted me off my feet, tossed me on my can. Almost before I landed he kicked me three times: in the kidney, in the ribs, in the head. He shoved me back into the corner with one foot. 

Through the pain I heard snorts of laughter coming from his table. 

“Fuck me silly, Prakesh, no idea you was a queer, man,” said Parvel Har. 

I rolled onto my side, and threw up.


	2. Lucky Son of a Bitch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I didn’t realize I’d been asleep until I heard my latch give way. I opened my eyes enough to see the dark shape of a man in the red light strobing my room. 
> 
> “You shouldn’t be here,” I told Tseng.

I took the freight elevator back out of the mountain that sits on top of the town, propping myself upright against a stack of empty crates on their way back to the harbor. 

Out in the air again I went back to the Pelican Motel, and picked up my bag. Moving like an old man I continued down the cobbled street towards the edge of the harbor, every breath punishing my ribcage, until I reached Minton Leary Lane, a fussy little bed-and-breakfast I hoped didn’t fit whatever Parvel Har thought was my profile. Once I got there I paid an old lady seven hundred gil to ignore the state of my face and keep quiet about what room I was staying in. It was too much, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. 

As the sun went down I secured a bottle of decent whiskey and a bag of ice chips and then I climbed the stairs to my third-floor room, one step at a time. 

 

—

Whatever courtesy I was going to find at Minton Leary Lane, there were other places, new to Junon, with different ideas. Across the street, their cheap neon signs flashed all night long; they bathed my room in red. I watched the light play as I got my shirt buttons undone, watched the light stripe the floor and the little lace curtain that hung in the window. I dropped the shirt, stepped out of my trousers and carefully approached the bed. 

My left ear was still ringing, and my face looked bad, but it was the Reno insides I was pondering as I eased myself into bed, clutching my whiskey and ice. I was turning fancy colors all down my left side. I was pretty sure the kidney was going to be okay, but I suspected meaningful contusions, possibly some internal bleeding, and at least one broken rib. 

I couldn’t do anything about my injuries, because I’d run out of luck. 

It was one of Hojo’s favorite jokes, actually. I guess he saw it in SOLDIER first—those guys always got a higher mako concentration than we did, and plenty of injections that bypassed the Turks. And then there was the lifestyle. All of us, SOLDIER, Turk or Army grunt, were using materia all the time, and every so often, something about the combination would come up snake-eyes. A guy’d go down with a stunning episode of mako poisoning, followed by a permanent allergic reaction if he was lucky, or organ failure and death, if he wasn’t. 

_The Cure,_ Hojo liked to say, _is definitely worse than the disease._

I took the point, took my chances. Took them for years, along with everyone else. And then, after Meteor fell, after Geostigma chopped everyone out and all hell broke loose with those Deepground motherfuckers, our resources got scarce or they got strange, and we had to lay off the mako. We added armor plates to interesting new areas and chewed stim gum and walked off the pain, and somewhere down the line my brain chemistry pulled a Crazy Ivan. I went into the WRO’s medlab for a booster shot and I had a seizure, the real deal, complete with sparkle-vision: I almost bit off my tongue. 

I was a lucky son of a bitch.

After that I had to change my thinking around. Nowadays death comes as the end and you can’t assume you’ll get out the other side of any mission, no matter how trivial. And broken ribs stay broken until they feel like healing, and if you don’t have a morphine drip handy, you drink whiskey. 

So that’s what I did. 

Staying in Junon had not been my plan. I was just trying to get transport to Costa del Sol, so I could keep up with my mark, who’d cashed in an impressive string of auto mechanics around Edge before he started moving west. It wasn’t a hard job, as the guy wasn’t exactly covering his tracks. 

As I lay there, drinking and trying not to let my ribs move, I thought about what I’d seen behind the metal slab.

It had been months since I’d talked to Tseng, not including our encounter that afternoon. I’d been in Rocket Town on a support detail; I knew he had been working on special projects for Rufus that had been keeping him away from Healen. Just how special? I wondered. With the Turks more or less dissolved, our relationship was more or less unofficial, and all I’d heard was a little this and that from Rufus about some enterprise he was trying to support in Mideel. 

Rufus, who’d sicced me on the mark in the first place, had never said shit to me about an undercover Tseng operation happening down in Junon Harbor. 

 

—

I didn’t realize I’d been asleep until I heard my latch give way. I opened my eyes enough to see the dark shape of a man in the red light strobing my room. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” I told Tseng.

He closed the door slowly and noiselessly, then he walked towards me, stripping off his jacket and tossing it at the bed. It slid down the bedspread and made a soft sound as it hit the floor. Tseng didn’t notice, or didn’t care. 

“Serious,” I said as he came alongside the bed. “Maybe they followed you. Or bugged me. I don’t know if there’s a room in this town safe from Parvel Har.”

“Reno, where was your intel?”

His voice was steady. He sounded rational, like standard-issue Tseng, but his eyes were too bright and his color was all wrong. He hadn’t had a bath in awhile, and I could smell him as he sat down on the side of the bed. I felt like I was invading his privacy. 

“There wasn’t any,” I told him, wincing as I turned on the bedside lamp. 

Tseng pulled a plastic baggie out of his pants pocket. Whatever was inside looked chalky and had a little shine to it, like the dust on the wings of a moth. He crumbled some of it between his fingers and smeared the powder on my chest. I could feel a funny pressure, a fizzy warmth, that touched my skin just before his hand reached me. He massaged it into my left side, none too gently. 

“Broken,” he said. It wasn’t a question. 

“Probably,” I say. “Look, I’m on my way to Costa del Sol, I’m—argh!—tailing that weird new Corel-based motherfucker for Rufus, guy they’re calling the Breather? Had no idea you were here.” The stuff Tseng was rubbing into my messed-up side was starting to take effect, and it clearly was not mundane stuff. 

He must have seen my question on my face. 

“Anti-inflammatory, tissue repair, and an osteoblast inducer,” he said. “Very pure, fast-acting. May not be—“ he laughed shortly—“very comfortable while it’s working. What do you mean, there was no intel?”

“Rufus,” I managed to say, “never mentioned you were here. He knew I had a layover—why? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Didn’t you,” Tseng said quietly, “do some housekeeping for the WRO, recently?”

We looked at each other for a second. 

“Some light housekeeping,” I conceded. 

“If he’s aware of your extra-curricular activities,” Tseng said, “maybe there’s something he doesn’t want Reeve to know.”

“Not filling me in almost got you killed,” I pointed out. “Tseng, what is this crazy fucking operation?”

Tseng wouldn’t meet my eyes. “As soon as you can travel,” he said, “I want you to get out of town. Go to Costa del Sol, or…I don’t care where you go. Don’t stay here. Don’t tell Rufus you saw me. Don’t…don’t tell Reeve.”

“Tseng—“ 

He leaned into me, pressing on my ribcage. 

“Agh! Fuck!” 

“It’s a mozo derivative,” Tseng told me, his voice grainy with fatigue. “It’s not mako-based, not directly at any rate. Skin contact has to be direct. But the deeper you can get it, the better it works. It…” He glanced down at his hands, covered in powder. “It’s not going to trigger you, Reno.”

Though I’d never gotten around to telling him myself, it looked like Tseng knew all about my seizure in the WRO labs. I made a little sound like laughter to cover up my embarrassment. It hurt.

“Mozo? I’ve always wanted to try that stuff,” I wheezed. “Maybe not on a broken rib.” 

Tseng worked his fingertips between my ribs, lightly pressing against the break. I tried not to pass out. 

“Junon boys have taken to calling it woven bone,” he said. 

“Junon boys are poets?” I let out another laugh, more like a squawk, and regretted it. 

“It accelerates the global healing process, knits bone, does a few other things,” Tseng said. “There’s a narcotic in the compound.”

“That’s good news,” I told him. “Gonna need it.” 

“Yes,” Tseng said. “You are.” He slid the pillow out from behind me. 

“What…what are you doing? Tseng, you can’t—you can’t stay here.” I put a hand on his arm. “Leave the stuff with me. I can take care of it. They find you with me, doing this? They’ll smell a rat. Everything we did in there—the whole cover will fall apart. They could kill you.” 

“You’re not going to be able to do this alone,” Tseng said. 

I watched his hand go into my side, and then I couldn’t get my breath at all.

 

—

I’ve been in pain plenty; back in the day, Tifa broke a number of my bones with her Meteodrive. But this was pain like a string of hot halogen lights coming on in a chain along the whole left side of my body, pain like the veil of regular life was being slid aside and it turned out that reality had just been blood and wrecked tissue and fractured bone all along. 

Tseng had climbed on top of me and was using his body weight to keep me on the bed. What he was trying to do, I figured out later, was deliver as much of the woven bone as he could to the break site and the contused, traumatized tissue that surrounded it, and that meant going not just around but through my ribs. He managed this by pushing my intercostal muscles aside with his fingers, holding me steady from behind with his other hand. 

“Almost there,” he muttered. I couldn’t answer; I was biting the pillow to stop myself screaming. I arched away from the fingers of his back hand and hit the fingers of his front hand through my ribs. Then the room went white. 

Bone edges shifted and met, and he said my name. 

Tseng, panting and soaked in sweat, slowly eased the pressure off my ribcage. He shook his head, like he was dizzy, and his hair brushed my cheek. I could feel a hum building in my bones, as something inside began expanding and contracting in a shimmering movement. I realized it was me, breathing. 

Tseng was propped up over me on his left arm. His legs had tangled up around me. His eyes drifted closed. 

“Tseng, this was stupid,” I whispered. “This was _stupid._ Coming here was too dangerous. You’ve got to go, right now. Get the fuck out of here.”

He didn’t move, didn’t say a word. 

Finally he gave a shuddering sigh. He reached out his hand, still dusty with woven bone, and stroked the bruised side of my face.


	3. My Own Personal Mystery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dangerous: Did I like brushing up against that mystery, did I feel it like a gravity well?
> 
> I did.

Let me explain something about me and Tseng: 

Way, way back in the day, I followed a guy into a bar. 

The bar was called the Bell Jar and it huddled under the Plate in Sector 2, not far from the train station. It was in the little shadow commerce district that had grown up around one or two guys who were trying to dislodge Don Corneo and create their very own mini-version of Wall Market. They had made some interesting friends Plateside, done some deals that brought the occasional Master of the Universe downstairs, looking for things you couldn’t find up there where you could see the sky. Well; once these guys were under Plate, we tended to regard them as our natural prey. 

The owners of the Bell Jar had rigged the place up with borrowed power, and the lights were beautiful, running bright edges along roofs and splashing purple and blue and green on the cracked foundations. That night you could see individual raindrops in the beams coming off the hard bright spots they were shining on the doors. 

Like every other Sector kid with ideas, I had a plan for myself. My plan was to roll this guy for his watch. 

He was wearing an Ota, luscious old military-issue from the Wutai War. It had a titanium bracelet and a square face with big numerals on it; the lume on those numbers was so good I could read them from fifteen feet away. 

The guy was a Wutainese guy, tall for it, with big shoulders like a brawler, but his wool coat looked like something a banker would wear and didn’t have a mark on it. Based on his nice clothes I thought he might be someone’s favorite son, but I’d cased him at the train station and I’d concluded that he didn’t have any company. That suggested he wasn’t a big Plate fish. There was something in how he held himself that said he might be packing, but it didn’t hang together with the other things about him I was prone to notice. None of it, actually, hung together: I couldn’t place him. 

I chewed on this for awhile as we each in turn negotiated the shattered pavement and the snaking line of partiers waiting to get into the Jar. I admit it pleased me. Possibilities lit up in my head like constellations. He could be one of the rare ones, I thought: could be he was one of the guys that Sector players didn’t like to talk about, one of the guys who moved like sharks through the dark city, and usually didn’t bother with the small fry. If so then he was dangerous, by my own count, even, which was skewed; I was a Sector 6 boy, and we played among the corpses on the regular. 

Dangerous: Did I like brushing up against that mystery, did I feel it like a gravity well? 

I did.

All the time, every day, it beckoned. It had gotten me into my line of work, running intel for the wiseguys in Amber’s network. And here it was in a banker’s coat, my own personal mystery, with the best watch I’d ever seen and hands with gun calluses on them. 

It was pretty out, with the colored light smeared everywhere. 

It was Old Midgar, and I was nineteen.

 

—

As I approached the bar where he stood, I threw out the idea of a straight lift; something about his energy told me the best way to get his watch was to get him mad. This meant coming on strong, so I did. 

I bumped him, hard, so whiskey sloshed out of his tumbler. He turned and I clocked two things: he was wide awake, ready for anything, and he was fast. 

I leaned in and licked his ear. 

He shifted away from the bar. I reeled back, smiling, and he came at me. 

As I felt him start his punch I moved towards him and a little to the outside, like we were dancing; I felt his fist go across my torso, its power just barely displaced. Staying close to his right I ran my left hand down his arm, got a bit of his coat and tugged lightly in the direction he was punching. This close I didn’t have a lot of leverage; all I had to work with was the guy’s own body weight, which was meaningful. I wanted to shift his balance, let his momentum run him just a little past where he intended to stop. That wobble—that moment when he’d have to recalibrate—was the moment I was going to use as an opening. If you were intelligent, if you were paying attention to the timing, you could get a lot done in that moment. 

He was so steady on his feet I wasn’t sure I’d found it. But at the end of his punch I felt it, the bounce I was waiting for. 

As he rocked forward, my fingers found his wrist and worked the clasp on the Ota. 

Then he had my arm bent behind me and pinned high against my back. His other hand was in my hair, and then my forehead hit the bar. 

I was seeing stars and blinking blood out of my eyes as he leaned into me. 

“You should know,” he said, his fingers knotted in my ponytail and his mouth almost touching my ear, “that long hair gives people a way to hurt you.”

“Your hair,” I said through gritted teeth, “is longer than mine, Jack.” 

“Yes. What does that tell you?”

Still holding me by my hair, he pulled me back upright, hooked a bar stool with his foot, and put me on it. Then he let me go. I rotated my shoulders. My forehead throbbed. Drinkers on either side of us weren’t looking our way, but we suddenly had a lot of elbow room at the bar. 

“Angels,” I said. “That fuckin’ hurt.” 

“Why are you interested in this?” he asked me, gesturing at his watch.

“Nice money,” I told him. He shook his head.

“The nice money,” he said, “is across the room, on Nang and his handler over there. Nang likes Ulysse Nardin and the one he’s wearing tonight has a platinum bracelet. His handler’s watch, strangely enough, is worth even more at Wall Market this month. Black numbers, black face, no lume, stealth PVD coating. Great big lugs. Underworld cachet.” The guy shook out the cuff of his shirt and straightened his sleeve. I could see just a sliver of the Ota now. “But you knew that. And you also know there are half-a-dozen other mooks in here wearing a lot of fancy money on their wrists who wouldn’t have seen you coming.” 

“Maybe,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have had to lick them, for one thing,” he said.

“Probably not,” I agreed.

He looked over at the bartender, who approached us, his eyes wary.

“Whiskey,” said the guy. “And one for him,” he added, tipping his head at me. 

I raised my eyebrows at him. 

“Give me a towel with that drink?” I asked the bartender, keeping my eyes on the guy who’d bloodied my face. 

The drinks came, and a paper napkin, which I applied to my forehead.

“Don’t look so surprised,” the guy said. 

“You drink with all the guys who come after your Ota?” 

“Just the ones,” he said, trying his whiskey, “who nearly get it off my wrist. So help me figure it out.”

I had no idea what was going on, but when the drink presented itself, I took it. 

“Maybe I misjudged you,” I said, and shrugged. “Thought you were an easy mark and got it wrong.” The guy laughed shortly, and shook his head. 

“Don’t try lying; it won’t work on me,” he said. “Your speed could be a fluke, but your skill implies experience. You knew. You picked me anyway.” 

“Maybe I just really like Otas.” I slurped my drink and wiped more blood off my face. “Ulysse Nardin’s a flash brand, but boring. The other guy’s Urwerk is just pretentious.” 

At that, he cracked a smile. 

 

—

After a little while he dropped some gil on the bar, and started to leave. Then he turned around and gave me a look, like he was taking my measurements. 

“Interesting,” he said finally, and left. People got out of his way as he moved toward the door. 

“That was Tseng of the Turks, you ignorant little fuck,” the bartender said, his face ashy.

“Interesting,” I told him, and swallowed the last of my drink.

 

—

 

I carried my report back to my boss. 

“Pursue it,” Amber said. She was in the big bathtub I’d scored for her a month ago, carefully running a razor up her leg. 

“Huh?” 

“Take his offer.”

I rummaged in the medicine cabinet and found an instant cold pack, which I activated by smacking it against the sink. Then I sat down on the toilet, breathing in the steam, the cold pack pressed to my head. When Amber snapped her fingers, I handed her the bath gel. 

“He was offering?”

“Pretty obvious,” Amber said, looking bored. “Go to Shinra Headquarters. Find him. Sign on,” she said. “I want you in there. Make sure you sell it.” 

I did what she asked. I had no idea that within six months, I wouldn’t be following her orders anymore. 

 

—

I showed up in Tseng’s office with my head shaved, except for my ponytail, which I left long, figuring he might like the subtext. 

The office was smaller than I expected, smelling very clean and mostly taken up with a big desk that looked like ebony, which was endangered as fuck and illegal in Midgar as far as I knew. Tseng, standing behind the desk, watched me come in with a look on his face I hadn’t learned how to read yet. 

He undid the clasp on his watch and threw it at me. I caught it one-handed. 

“Put it on,” he said.

“Why?”

“Did you see a big, bald guy in the corridor?”

“Maybe,” I said. I was running my fingers across the dial of the watch but I couldn’t get my eyes to leave his face. 

“Go back outside,” Tseng said, “and tell him to take you down to quarantine.”

“What the fuck,” I said.

“SOP for Sector recruits,” he said. “We screen for tuberculosis here.” 

“Aw, fuck you,” I said.

“I inherited the Ota, in case you were wondering,” he said. “But if you want it so badly, you’d better keep it. They’ll have you for three weeks. When they’re done with you, come back to me.”

I was wearing that watch when I dropped the Plate on Sector Seven. It got lost, I guess, in the shuffle. When I woke up in the hospital, it was gone. 

I still miss the feel of it on my wrist.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a revision of an earlier, unfinished piece, also called "New Junon," that was posted on ff.net back in 2010 or so. Over the years, my way of writing the characters--notably Reno--has changed. I wanted to explore the ideas I'd started looking at back then, but I also wanted to spend some time with Reno as I understand him now, finding his narrative rhythm and looking around inside his head. As a result, while I feel some of the basic tone elements of this are the same, there are some new flavors.


End file.
